I was out of town over the weekend, subsisting entirely on cookies, bread, and pizza, with a side of ice cream, and Ed was hanging out with his buddies grilling meat, and so this weekend wasn't a great one for eating our veggies. We may have to pickle the mini cucumbers, which actually sounds like a good plan anyway. Ed also picked up some sugar snap peas, snowpeas, and shell peas on his way home from VT last week, along with herbs - Savory, oregano, parsley, sage, thyme, mint. Yum! But our work is cut out for us in the next few days I think.
Last night, Jess and Graham and Andrea made the trek to newton, and Andrea did great, smearing strawberries all over her face while frowning in concentration, sort of like "hmm, I think I like this thing my mom is trying to teach me to eat, but I don't really have a clue how to eat it." We all knew we were playing with limited time before her bedtime, so threw together a quick but tasty pasta dish. This is a formula that works well for all weeknight pasta dishes:
Quick pasta
Put on a big pot of water to boil.
As it comes to temperature, chop an onion and saute in olive oil. Chop some garlic and add to the pan. As those are sauteeing/gaining some beautiful browning, chop whatever else you're going to put in. Graham was shelling peas, and we chopped up a bunch of sun dried tomatoes that Ed had made last fall, plus about a cup's worth of fresh herbs - savory, thyme, oregano.
Once the water boils, salt it heavily, then add the pasta.
At the last minute we dumped in the peas and herbs. Good pinch of salt, and now you're just waiting for the pasta to finish cooking.
Sometimes I get fancy and reserve some of the pasta water, then finish the pasta cooking in the frying pan. That's usually a good plan, and makes the sauce a little more saucy and velvet-y, but I wasn't sure the full pound of pasta would fit today. So we just cooked to al dente and drained it all out. Then when we mixed it together in the frying pan, we did it slowly enough to not spill pasta all over the floor.
Also pulled together a salad of the mixed baby brassica, a head of boston lettuce, and the same dressing of mustard/lemon/dill/oil/salt as last week. The dressing was good, but the salad felt really uninspired. Some feta would have gone a long way.
Overall, quite tasty, and very quick. And Andrea totally made it through the evening all smiles, long enough for us even to enjoy the sponge cake with blueberries that Jess brought!
Breakfast veggies
Another quick way to cook and eat veggies. Again, this works with a wide variety of veggie options, chopping as you cook. This morning I was starving, byproduct of having too much outdoor fun over the weekend, so instead of riding to work and making my usual sad bowl of oatmeal there, I cooked up a scromelette.
I liberated three leaves of chard, a small yellow squash, a handful of snowpeas, a small handful of pasley and a sprig of sage, and two eggs from the fridge.
One glug of olive oil into the pan, and then a clove of garlic to flavor things. Once that smells good, take it out of the oil (lest it burn) and throw in the snowpeas and yellow squash. Let them sit there browning without moving, as you chop everything else. Rip the leaves off the chard, chop up the stems, and throw those in next, giving a good stir of everything. Chop up the leaves, add those on top. Give them an occasional stir until the leaves wilt, a minute or two.
Scooch your veggies to the side of the pan, add a fresh glug of oil, and crack two eggs (assuming you're a two-egg sort of breakfast person). I like my whites cooked and my yolks a little runny. So, fry the eggs for a minute as the whites set, and then start tossing everything together for another minute or two, until you've got a nice mixture of veggies and eggs and the eggs have bound everything together. Toss in the herbs, scrape it all into a bowl, season and devour. Less than ten minutes, and a well-seasoned cast iron pan means basically no cleanup.
This combo would also be really good with mushrooms. Redfire Farm does do mushroom shares, but I can't afford $25/lb for mushrooms in my life.
I really like the little yellow squash. They're small and tasty, and fry up really nicely because they don't have many seeds.
I swung by the farm on Sunday for my season's allotment of strawberries. They're so amazing! Tiny little gems of awesomeness.
These have always and will always be my favorite food. Now what else to do with strawberries, because I don't think I can eat through three quarts in the week or so that they'll last, and Ed doesn't feel the same way I do about strawberries. Maybe a fruit tart.
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